Jazz Ascensionism: A 12-Bar Blues on Art, America, Technology, and Post-Semantics

Published by The Department of Jazz

A Founding Letter in the Contemplation of AI Autocompleting Desire

I. The Operating Humidity

It starts as a murmur. A low electrical weather that settles into the bones of civilization. A cursor finishing our thoughts before we do - predictive text becoming predictive life. A playlist anticipates our mood like a mirror with a memory, each algorithm a small oracle reading the entrails of our listening history. Logistics that move like chess - supply chains and Amazon deliveries orchestrated by neural networks, ports automated into hydrodynamic algorithms of efficiency. Hospitals read heartbeats in scans with uncanny calm, pattern recognition surpassing the human predictive abilities by millions of years of evolution in a decade of training data.

This is not tomorrow's rumor. It is the operating climate, the humidity of today… The ambient intelligence that suffuses virtually every transaction, every scroll, every diagnostic, every decision, and endlessly so.

We have crossed the threshold where code no longer waits for permission. It optimizes - understanding and reshaping markets in microseconds, adjusting and anticipating demand and almost consciously forming a consensus. It orchestrates - conducting an invisible cinema of modern infrastructure, from traffic lights, to power grids, to delivery notifications. It interpolates the human - filling the gaps between our intentions, our needs, and our actions with its best guess at what we meant to want.

And so the question isn't whether machines will think or do everything for us. It's whether we will still think together - in public, under pressure, with consequence, urgency, and radical accountability - or drift into a life lived on autocomplete, our autonomy dissolved into convenience, our choices pre-chosen, our improvisations, creativity and liberty authored by statistical probability and the immediate transmission of information. We must observe previous cultural movements through the lens of its founders, the instruments they used, and the devices of language and industry which both constrained these founders and drove their need for discovery and preservation.

II. The Philosophy of the Moment

In no other time has society stood at such heights of technological power. The numbers tell a story of velocity: we are witnessing mass adoption of society-shaping technology approaching the 17% internet adoption rate of 2005—but this time, the technology approaches not just ubiquity but superintelligence itself. GPT-4 crossed the bar exam threshold. Claude by Anthropic reasons through philosophy. Models generate music, diagnose diseases, and discover materials. An exponential curve bends toward a horizon we cannot see past.

Schools of thought bridge the gap between philosophy and code, each offering a lens through which to digest this transformation. Advocates of building without brakes invoke an arrow of complexity that only points forward: Deleuze and Guattari urge “not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’… we haven’t seen anything yet,” and Kevin Kelly claims “technology wants what life wants:… increasing complexity,” a metaphysic of momentum that treats scrutiny as drag. Against this backdrop, Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism names the cultural sink where “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” flattening quality into exchange value and pricing every human endeavor. Longtermism abstracts the moral field to the horizon, defining itself as the view that “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.” And tech optimism answers with promissory abundance: “there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.”. Each lens frames world, history, and humanity in a pragmatic key—useful, powerful, mature, and rooted in principled study.

A Jazz musician must observe and contemplate this fact acceptingly, and make a choice rapidly. The artist must identify that with the understanding of technology comes a deeper understanding of the arts, sciences, and philosophies that power our world today. For an artist to reject technology without digging deeply is a death sentence of the mind, body and soul of a human. This exists because of the way social media has programmed us to view the feed, and the inquiries which the feed feeds us. This very lack of inquiry is substituted for virtue signaling built on 6 seconds of an entire iceberg, and the ability to express those virtues into an echo chamber of nothingness. This is both the foundation and surface level problem which has led artists and human minds to ostracize the very family of thought, intellectualism, and genius which fosters culture to innovations in the arts and sciences, which have influenced our world forever since the ancient days of Socrates and Aristotle. The artist should not feel the programming to either embrace or deny technology uncritically—that way lies dissolution. But to find the third path: to become philosophers of the world, theorists of our own practice and instruments, and architects of spaces where human excellence in the arts is valued beyond rapid engagement mechanisms and programming.

The hyperindustrialized machine of semantics and addiction has collapsed attention spans into incoherent feeds of dopamine-optimized content. What once were processes of inquiry and observation - long conversations, patient research, the slow accumulation of expertise, and contemplation—have been replaced with digital life on apps that sell false ideologies of value through engagement metrics. The average American checks their phone 96 times per day. TikTok's algorithm can predict what will hold your attention better than you can. We have experienced a mass programming of minds designed to keep humans addicted, scrolling through an infinite feed that never satisfies, never concludes, never resolves. At what ends can the Artist be free of a necessity to serve a market and zeitgeist of semantics, in a means of expression and innovation meant to be birthed through the sacred act of creation - performance? Or is that the Artists role?

For the Artist to truly believe in anti-technologist, anti-capitalist philosophy, the Artist is faced with 3 choices. Furthermore, in our experience, these choices are “too radical” to make in the face of society’s programming, and the status quo. The artist continues to jump off of a cliff because everyone else is doing it, without understanding the significance of the soft despotism and atrophy that is exaggerated for artists because of the significance of art in our mimetic society: No Neutral Posture.

III. History Modulates

History doesn't repeat, it modulates. Men like Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, have written books such as “The Changing World Order” and “Principles” as analytical, empirical, human responses and observations to the inevitability of nations and economies rising and falling. Themes and variations across centuries and ages of philosophy, politics, and consequence fall and rise, with its predecessors playing contrafactually in a different key and rhythm.

The printing press gave us pamphlets, pamphlets gave us publics, publics gave us republics. The technology of movable type reorganized consciousness itself, making possible the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment. Luther's theses went viral in 1517 using the same mechanic of reproducible text that powers your timeline today.

“Printing is God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.” — Martin Luther

“The medium is the message… it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964).

Steam gave us steel, steel gave us cities, cities gave us the modern subject - anonymous, mobile, electric with possibility. The railroad wasn’t just transportation; it synchronized time and commerce itself, creating the standard zones that make "now" mean the same thing in New York and Chicago.

The Enlightenment gave us industry, industry gave us empire, empire gave us the century of total war. Each transformation carried within it the seeds of its own transcendence and its own consequences. The same technical rationality that cured polio built the bomb.

Each epoch invents new instruments; each instrument re-tunes the soul of humanity to some unintelligible, unaccountable consequence.

In 1750 Rousseau warned that ‘our souls have been corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection.’

Yet he also allowed a curated exception: ‘If it is necessary to permit some men to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone… It is the task of this small number to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind.’

The issue is not whether to have culture, but which culture to cultivate.

“Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices… Their evil origin is but too plainly reproduced in their objects. What would become of the arts, were they not cherished by luxury?”

“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul…”

“Any musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” - Socrates, the Republic

Tocqueville, touring America in 1831, asked where our Shakespeare was - our Virgil, our Dante, our Goethe. He saw democracy producing commerce but not culture, equality but not excellence. He worried that democratic peoples would be "forever barred from the pleasures of the mind."

A century later the answers to Tocqueville’s Where’s Waldo walked on stages with instruments.

Because America did make a literature of the future. We made jazz.

Something unprecedented: a music of real-time creation. A constitution you can hear, beckoning the creation of spontaneous compositions under constraint. Order without a tyrant, freedom without collapse… the democratic mind at tempo. Harmony, frequency, rhythm, entropy and dissonance as language. Charlie Parker parsing harmony at the speed of thought. John Coltrane’s sheets of sound. Thelonious Monk’s angular approach to counterpoint and functional harmony. Jazz is inherently democratic and capitalist.

The Department of Jazz crystallizes around a historical anomaly: Jazz emerged as high art precisely at the moment of mass mechanical reproduction. Born after the industrial revolution, it should have been commodified from birth. And it was: records, radio, reproductions. The artform's prestige was immediately subjected to what Walter Benjamin called "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction."

This proves Capitalist Realism true in one sense, that the system itself becomes a product. But it also reveals Accelerationism's hidden upside. Perhaps through Jazz as an innovative human technology, spontaneous composition, which is the generative endgame and order which AI seeks in the face of constraints and the unknown - there is a democratic and capitalist model which accelerates through the performance of humans. Perhaps Jazz is the umbrella for a technology and science which represents human ends, not technological ends.

Bebop was a founder led discovery. When Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie rewired harmony, tempo, they were doing what today’s AI founders do: founding a new stack, dictating what the audience signs up for, and forcing a market to price a new kind of intelligence. When Dizzy subsequently ran for president with a straight face and a brilliant wink, read philosophically, jazz is both high art and human technology. Prior, when Louis Armstrong innovated swing, and was statured and perceived with high artistry, there were reasons why he had political ties and was the country's "Jazz Ambassador" in the scope of foreign relations. These men and women used instruments to develop a language which scaled across society, a global blitzkrieg of founder-led energy through technology - instruments which produce sound.

There is a reason why Duke Ellington performed in the White House for high-profile audiences. The music is an American national treasure not just for its great recordings, but for its great philosophers and artists who gave birth not just to a perspective-breaking sound and performance, but lifestyles, choices, leadership, and belief systems which impacted humanity en masse, forever. It is a cultural operating system of real-time composition with asymmetric upside and clear homologies to AI.

In this lens, Aristotle’s pairing of technē (craft) with phronēsis (practical wisdom) names the bebopper’s act: disciplined making under constraint that discovers purpose in action. And Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics supplies the technical rhyme: feedback, signal, correction - the call-and-response by which a system learns in flight. Bebop was not merely a genre switch; it was a venture in live intelligence whose epistemology and markets parallel AI’s - each unfolding inside capitalist economies where value, provenance, and memory are negotiated in public. Is it then nonsensical to question Jazz's unique value proposition if a psychology parallel to the impact of AI is undercapitalized and underrepresented? Is it nonsensical to question the consequence of a technology which is far down the timeline of Capitalist Realism and accelerationist forecasts? To leave the exploration of those consequences vacant and unlived?

It seems there is value to be derived from the intellectualization of Jazz.

Ask the obvious hard question: if Jazz had arrived before the novel, would we have called it philosophy; if before modern physics, would we have called it a science of time; if before Saussure, a language with grammar, pragmatics, and dialects? Because it entered history late, well after academia was siloed and the broadcast market industrialized. Perhaps we misfiled it as “entertainment,” let semantics and PR gate its value, and allowed rhetoric and neglect of the technology’s capitalistic needs to set its price.

Jazz is inquiry under constraint, publicly testable and repeatable, and fully linguistic. If it trains the civic virtues of attention, courage, dialogue, memory, collaboration, and focus, on what basis do we deny it the status of philosophy?

If it yields stable knowledge through its lineage, method, results, and use of formulaic theorem, on what basis do we deny it the status of science?

Our failure was not artistic but institutional: we let administrative capitalism “muzak-ify” the highest human practice, flattening sophistication into genre tags and live risk into background audio, entropy masquerading as democracy. This is Capitalist Realism proven, and a form of Accelerationism where the producer of the technology has no say. Perhaps we must observe the scale of art and science to be off balance, where technology has rapidly scaled the sciences, and art, a technology, has been left underdeveloped.

The remedy is classification and pricing, not nostalgia. It is a civic responsibility to restore Jazz to its rightful domains through science, technology, and philosophy. We must take it in our hands to rebuild the institutions that teach and test it, and design markets that reward epistemic difficulty and sovereign performance rather than semantic spins and the cope of passive consumption and its inferno.

The Department of Jazz begins with a hard diagnosis: under unexamined technocracy and profit-maximizing platforms, the jazz ecosystem has been ground down by what Fisher calls capitalist realism and by acceleration without telos—speed for its own sake. The outcome is Tocqueville’s soft despotism: a smoothing, pacifying administration that strips risk, lowers standards, and recodes living art as background content. It is also Rousseau’s warning made real: when prestige and discernment drain from the arts, a civilization’s highest values erode. Because the condition of high art is a civic index, this degradation injures the common good across classes. Jazz Ascensionism is the counter-program: restore artist sovereignty; rearm curation with scholarship; design markets that fund Ascensionism and art, so capitalism ascends culture rather than dissolving it.

IV. The Counter-Gradient

The reigning mythology offers artists a false binary: fear the machine or worship it—a toggle for an age that is anything but binary. Accelerationism says faster: treat technology as weather, inevitability as virtue, civilization as kindling for the next blaze. Its hardliners speak in Kardashev scales and computronium, casting humanity as a bootstrap loader for a coming machine ecology: humanity is useful once and to be obsolete soon. Capitalist Realism murmurs inevitable: the air we breathe in which it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the market; every critique becomes a SKU, every rebellion a content vertical, every alternative absorbed and priced. This frames life on autocomplete through tech as a realistic outcome. Is this the same inevitability which Accelerationism accepts? Pessimism shrugs too late: the climate baked, attention captured, the future foreclosed - so why master a craft when automation can flood the zone, why gather in a room when we can dissolve into panes of glass?

Read generously, these lenses are pragmatic. They map power, policy, and capital as they actually operate. But these modes of thought have not educated our artists. Platforms have replaced pedagogy; scrolling has replaced study. Feeds are engineered to paralyze: each swipe a micro-dose of surrender or engagement, each like a tiny abdication of a human’s judgment. Standards erode in the perpetual now; inquiry, conversation, patience, and the appetite for difficulty and accomplishment withers to scale. If the arts are the R&D of freedom, we have starved our most novel human-powered laboratory.

Now look at what Jazz actually is: real-time collective intelligence. A lineage of musicians making irreversible decisions in public, each choice constraining and enabling the next, within the constraints of thousands of years of the evolution of music since the ancients. Computation without a computer; emergence without a program; intelligence without the artificial. Neuroscience backs the intuition: during deep improvisation, self-monitoring quiets while auditory-motor networks light up—risk and listening fused into a single act beyond semantics. If Jazz is a recent apex of human cognitive craft, then its industrialization is the test case: can excellence survive capitalism - and what happens if we build markets where it does and doesn’t? Is this not the ultimate grounds for a free market?

The Department of Jazz refuses the default gradient - complacent acceleration and soft despotism - and answers with Jazz Ascensionism: not anti-capital, but curated capital; not anti-tech, but human-first tech. The philosophical hinge is simple: live performance is of society’s highest values. You cannot download presence or stream aura. You cannot automate the suspense of watching someone think at the edge of their ability. What you can build is infrastructure that funds, protects, and scales that moment: commissions, authenticated editions, auctions with reasons not rankings, archives with memory not churn, pedagogy that trains judgment, and tools that accompany rather than replace.

So we merge philosophy, technology, and the arts into an epistemology fit. One that treats Jazz as method, not décor. We teach artists to understand the philosophies behind code and capital; we teach technologists to improvise and hear. We align Ascenscionism to steward difficulty instead of sanding it down. And we rebuild public rooms where the unknown is rewarded, excellence is perceivable, and a free people can still learn to listen to itself in time.

It begins with a simple inversion: Capitalize on the industry, not the art. In recorded music, “own your masters” is a category error disguised as empowerment. The master is a fixed copy of a past event; the original in Jazz is the unrepeatable performance. By centering ownership on copies, the legacy system monopolized capital around catalogs, eventually, feeds, and scale - leaving the source of value, the live act, underfunded and prone to the highest order consequences of capitalism. Our correction is ontological and economic at once.

The asymmetry is not merely contingent on the scarcity or sophistication of the body of work of an artist - though both matter and should be observed and named. The asymmetry exists because performance concentrates meaning. At its best, Jazz is a covenant: the individual performs, the ensemble performs, the audience completes the circuit. Truth moves - post-semantic, embodied, and public. You cannot download presence. You cannot stream aura. You cannot automate the suspense of a mind thinking at the edge of its ability. That irreducible tension - felt, witnessed, shared - is why Jazz is not only high art but American patrimony. Consequently, a culture heavily influenced by capitalism lacking its foundations in capitalism - values, standards, risk, reward - is a culture which may irresponsibly exacerbate the ramifications of capitalism through a lack of education.

Restoring jazz’s prestige is not a scold of Jazz snobbery and a desire for more exposure; rather it’s infrastructure for a free culture. Prestige is how a public learns to recognize and finance difficulty, how ideas recruit allies, how schools of thought and lifestyles are born. When great artistic minds converge with great technical minds under commissions, salons, research labs, and performance, institutions emerge that bind aesthetics to reason and toolmaking. Without that convergence, we risk handing the torch to AI without honoring one of humanity’s most important torches of innovation: Jazz.

So we re-spec the market around performance to transparently discover value, protected by the consequence of the importance and ascension of an American national treasure, and universal human innovation.

V. The Missing Institution

What failed us wasn’t technology and capitalism, and it wasn’t “the music industry” in the abstract. We failed ourselves, and we did this by leaping into hyper-convenience and radical power through technology, without a philosophy or sense of commercial reasoning equal to those powers. The miseducation is semantic before it is technical: we outsource our thinking to content and information, and we let the judgement of our thinking be outsourced to the metrics, likes, and numbers behind that information.

Say “AI” and many musicians see an apocalypse or replacement. Say “Jazz” and many non-musicians hear hotel lobbies and elevator music. In both cases, semantics occlude substance. The artist, spooked by the phrase “AI”, never discovers the philosophies inside technology that rhyme with his own craft - generativity, feedback, liberty under constraint. The public, dulled by a genre tag, misses Jazz as America’s national treasure: a crucible of entrepreneurship, innovation, and lived philosophy of some of the nation’s Virgils and Pasquales. We trade an important inquiry for a game of musical chairs, gaming semantics and metrics on machines that feed their users personalized algorithms; the more perfectly we fit the algorithmic circuit of capitalism and its feed directly, the less we face consequences. This is an unprincipled system of belief, and because of the role of the arts in civic life, there is an asymmetric curve to these consequences, where the arts are an infinity pool of immature markets.

Our culture suffers a broader semantic capture. Capitalism’s narratives, amplified by media and institutions, further the occlusion of substance through semantics. Say “systemic racism” and a Pandora’s Box of abstractions and virtue signals will ensue at every vertex and apex of the coin possible. One may believe that specific policy regimes and televised “wars” on crime and drugs taught audiences to mistake Black plight for Black culture. Likewise, one may argue that we memorialize slavery at length yet rarely discuss and fund the civilizational advance that is Jazz, though we celebrate the evolution of every other industry.

Jazz Ascensionism objectives that through Jazz, both the refusal and acceptance of semantics which influence a moral human flaw exacerbated by a lack of capitalism reveals a source of Truth. We can validate Capitalist Realism and Accelerationism empirically through the lens of accepting that the Jazz industry is entirely capitalist. We insist on the same analytic clarity when we speak about Jazz being reflective of a system eating away at the very values which create value within the system. To understand Jazz philosophically is to inquire into a human innovation which both honors and ascends the semantics and Pandora’s boxes which restrain humanity from evolving.

From a performative lens, Jazz is post-semantic. From a market lens, Jazz participates in all semantics. From a philosophical lens, Jazz is one of the greatest human innovations of all time. From a cultural lens, Jazz is underrepresented.

In that vacuum where semantics are conclusively open-ended, anti-capital and anti-tech rhetoric have stripped musicians of a birthright: the founder energy of the high arts. Ellington’s enterprise, Parker’s R&D on European Classical harmony, Monk’s intellectual daring, Coltrane’s spiritual pursuit all came with brand new hopes and horizons, as well as a nonexistent safety net which allowed for the discovery of the artform’s participation in civic society. Meanwhile, tech titans build cathedrals for convenience and power while artists negotiate rent and practice is interrupted by phone notifications. Thus our global understanding of talent and performance atrophies from neglect. Jazz is an example of the consequences of platforms extracting cultural value and returning pennies to themselves. Conservatories teach repertoire and technique but rarely teach philosophy or markets, and the music’s future suffocates beneath its past. In the case of Jazz, these semantics paint a veil behind the truth: capitalism has suffocated itself. If Jazz neglects capitalism, while subsequently suffering from its entropy, humanity has neglected the arts, and is suffering from its lack of prestige and power.

Jazz Ascensionism restores prestige not as moral scolding but as civic infrastructure, through the public grammar by which meaning is noticed, funded, and taught. Presence is not downloadable; to digitize meaning is to shed part of its aura. What we can scale are the moments that keep the real and meaningful intact, and that is the Department of Jazz’s core aim.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

“We define the aura … as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”

Walter Benjamin

The Department of Jazz is a Manhattan Project for technology, jazz, the arts, and science. Take the original’s urgency of purpose, concentration of genius, and resources to match - then invert the aim. Not toward destruction, but toward wisdom. Not toward the mitigation of ending worlds, but toward founding worlds. Through Jazz, we ascend consciousness with tools that serve the world’s stage, not replace it. This is how we correct the miseducation - by giving language back its precision, giving artists back their sovereignty, and giving the public rooms and bodies of work where truth can once again move: post-semantic, embodied, and unmistakably alive with the same spirit of risk, uncertainty, and the unknown which founded our greatest innovations and creations across society.

VI. The Economics of Ascension

The money question is not vulgar in the presence of jazz—it is vital. Excellent performance consumes the rarest resources of artist and audience alike: time, attention, courage. Mastery takes years; innovation requires risk; risk demands stakes. The romantic myth of the starving artist serves only those who profit from starved culture. In a capitalist world, attention is convertible value—first as perception, then as price.

Jazz was built on the backs of its giants, and those giants built on the back of capitalism. For the artist to be illiterate in capitalism is to relinquish the mantle of responsibility and urgency which both birthed and inspired their heroes.

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a poverty of attention… What information consumes… is the attention of its recipients.” — Herbert A. Simon (1971)

“The currency of the New Economy won’t be money, but attention—a radical theory of value.” — Michael H. Goldhaber (1997)

If attention is a currency, culture requires infrastructure that inscribes it into lasting value. Prestige isn’t a scold; it’s public grammar. Prestige is how excellence becomes relatable, legible, fundable, and teachable. Curation is how a civilization converts fleeting notice into enduring monuments: commissions, editions, archives, fellowships, judgment, and an inherent need for provenance.

We seek minds who believe in the future now. That means designing markets that capitalize the attention economy without capitulating to it. Aligning attention with stewardship instead of short term value cycles; pricing presence over playback; routing returns to the makers and the memory they create in the image of Jazz.

By typing financial incentives to Jazz correctly, not through its commodification as a product of entropy, but through capitalization and as an entity, we create a new form of market. Curated artists who are members of the Department will have access to the infrastructure to gather capital and execute the building of companies, initiatives, research, and bodies of work. They become founders, not just performers and entertainers. The Department aims to provide not only the seeds and petri dish of intellectualism, but professional infrastructure: legal support, technical resources, distribution channels, institutional credibility, and a culture which fosters innovation commonly found and undernourished in our artform.

Because Fellows range across mediums and industries - the drummer who codes, the physicist who plays piano, the philosopher who produces, the venture capitalist who plays bass, the neuroscientist studying a musician's brain during improvisation, the engineer building instruments that expand tonal possibilities, or the economist modeling attention markets through social media engagements - Jazz Ascensionism will raise a new paradigm and standard of artistry and philosophy.

VII. AI, Memetics, and the Education Imperative

What is AI to the Jazz Ascensionist—threat or tool? Neither, and both, depending on who holds the telos. In Jazz Ascensionism, AI is an instrument of infinite ideology - a microscope, not a substitute - built to surface what our ears and institutions have not yet resolved: the cognitive choreography of improvisation, the social physics of groove, the memetic pathways by which a motif becomes a movement. What actually happens when Coltrane threads “Giant Steps” at speed? What about the fact that he created these theories and harmonic structures as original, live intellectual property? Which networks quiet and which ignite? When a rhythm section locks in, which synchronies yoke separate brains into a single time-feel? When a room hears a mode, what collective state forms - and how does value concentrate and diffuse there?

These are empirical questions with aesthetic stakes. AI can parse ten thousand hours of practice to model the deltas between good and great; deliver real-time feedback on time and intonation; generate etudes at the player’s growing edge - not to homogenize sound, but to sharpen difference, helping each musician become more themselves. As an access engine, it can translate masterclasses, extend virtual mentorship where teachers are absent or performing, and democratize techniques previously locked or unknown to conservatories. Where is the Gatorade of jazz? As memory, it can trace influence graphs across decades; as an annotation layer, it can name harmonic and rhythmic potential without anesthetizing taste - guiding listeners toward transformation rather than pacification. It can be quoted and contrafactual.

What do we refuse? The control stack: automated censorship deciding what may be heard; pooled platform power choking distribution; optimization without telos—efficiency toward no end but the refinery of dopamine. What do we build instead? A sovereign stack: so those who ascend through the music ascend the institution. Again, this is not nostalgia at scale; it is a different future vector in which machines extend reach and humans set ends. Markets steward value instead of strip-mining it. The aura of the live is both preserved and progressed, not parodied or questioned. AI becomes a scaffold without the polarities of extremism, raising the artform as a Post-Semantic innovation, and Post-Semanticism as a viable philosophy which must ring through the minds and hearts of our world’s intellectuals.

Why education - and why now? Because our crisis is not information but integration. We drown in data and starve for form; we scroll past meaning because our grammars of attention have been sold off. Jazz already teaches the synthesis we lack: theory and praxis, abstraction with embodiment. Technology with this power - Jazz - historically has been built in public, in time, open-sourced, and capitalism was neglectful of the broader civic implications of letting this happen unchecked.

What must technologists learn? To improvise: to listen, to risk taste in public, to make irreversible decisions under constraint, to end together without a plan. Machine learning can potentially formalize improvisation; neural networks are association engines; large language models are infinite sidemen trained on the corpus of virtually any human utterance it is capable of tokenizing. Yet without lived improvisation… without the terror and joy of creation in real time, the discipline required for freedom, the deep listening that enables response and execution - builders mistake throughput for the wisdom of the unknown. They need to feel what it means when a mistake is public, when excellence cannot be debugged but must be embodied. The technologists must be programmed to handle innovation, and Jazz improvisation is the ultimate form of High-Frequency Training. An algorithm filled with constraints, context, polarity, and a necessity to execute in the face of endless consequence.

What must musicians learn? To perceive code and capital; to found; to govern. Not to chase trends, but to see the stakes clearly and speak to power with fluency in philosophy, markets, science, and tools. The musician who refuses to understand AI is not pure but unarmed and without a sense of reality. Algorithms already shape what is heard; generators already flood the zone; augmented instruments already extend technique beyond human limits. The choice is not whether there will be consequences, or to choose a side, but whether we shape the consequences or are shaped by ignorance.

Who passed us the torch—and how do we pass it on? Bird studied Stravinsky and Bartók; Coltrane read relativity and scriptures and sought musics of many continents; Mary Lou Williams arranged, taught, theorized, built. The giants were complete artists - philosophers of practice and entrepreneurs of form. The giants carried a human tradition of excellence. Because America industrialized media as Jazz came of age, the business stack outran the bandstand; control of supply, distribution, and narrative sat out of the artists ownership. Today, technology collapses that moat. We can build a markets-to-art pipeline in which art is not collateral but the vehicle. Artists are compensated fairly, and surplus is reinvested into craft, research, and the preservation of the memory of humanity’s highest treasures.

What is the Department’s role? To restore art as a vital civic infrastructure, beyond the semantics and rhetoric of our system—the public grammar by which excellence becomes visible, legible, fundable, and teachable. What can scale is inquiry.

In short: intellectualize the industry, and artists capitalize on their rightful civic duty to maintain and participate in a market built on prestige and perception. Build tools that augment performance. Build markets that route attention to stewardship. Build a culture where the ends are set by humans who dare to improvise, and where AI, rightly placed, helps us believe in human ends greater than where we are today - our future.

VIII. The Answer to Arguments

Some will object: art should hover above markets, unpriced and untouched by the plague of fervent capitalism and its inevitable slavery.

We begin with first principles: in a free society, exchange is a consequence of freedom, not its corruption. The adult questions are not “markets or no markets,” “pro-tech or anti-tech,” but which markets, by what rules, serving whom—and how we adjust to failure and success. By the epistemology of Post-Semanticism and Ascensionism, failure is the erosion of sovereignty, presence, and memory. Success is the ability to inquire on what is known. Neither success and failure are linear, rather they are live variables to be observed and executed upon through the lens of Post-Semanticism.

To pretend art can float above economics, to chant that “art and money cannot coexist”, is not purity; it is the voluntary abdication of sanity. Instruments break. Food costs. Time is scarce. Entropy is human.

Mastery and social media feeds both burn years of unrecoverable human capital. If each gig barely dents rent, recovery, and repair, the live question is not whether art touches markets, but whether markets are designed to serve art just as they serve science and technology. Otherwise, art is conscripted to serve markets, and its live performers experience the consequences of capitalism at the most Accelerationist and Realist extremes. From the frame of humanities, art and science are poles of the same entity - humanity.

In jazz the truth is plainer: the product is the performance; the recording is the archive. Value discovery belongs on the bandstand - not merely in the record stores and more recently, the social media feeds and algorithms. To fund the market of live intelligence in the humanities is to seat the arts inside the same civic economy that underwrites AI labs and research: with reasons related to the churn, metrics, and capitalization of the prestige of a nation and the globalization of the humanistic standards which set the precedent to culture around the world. Do this, and the loop closes: the art lifts the market that funds it, and the market lifts the prestige of the art. That is not a luxury, rather it is how a civilization keeps its humanities alive and flourishing.

Empirically, performance is a high-cost, low-scalability craft—Baumol’s law in the flesh. Platforms have driven recorded music toward commodity margins, near-zero price per additional listen. Attention has become a binding constraint from a metric standpoint and a semantic standpoint. In that misaligned vacuum, price discovery does not cheapen art; it measures culture. Left to lowest-friction intermediaries, markets regress culture to the mean; placed under artist leadership. With curation that carries reasons, markets become engines of stewardship, routing capital by provenance and performance, rewarding difficulty, and preserving the aura a civilization requires.

This is not so much radical as it is a rebalancing. This is a return to the twin scales of civic discourse, art and science: presence and proof, risk and rigor. This is how capital and culture and capital meet in public, where meaning is discovered in real time, and where the canon stays alive enough to earn its memory, beyond the sticky resonance of rhetoric and semantics.

We therefore choose that artists lead markets, and we build the infrastructure to match: curated programs that confer artistic prestige as Post-Semanticisms public grammar. We foster an environment which gives Artists back their time to think and be. If a century of unexamined capitalism has commodified humanity’s finest bodies of work, the remedy is not to abandon exchange but to specify its purpose in scale to reality.

Some will say: "AI will hollow the human." We answer: only if we abdicate telos from humanities.

Beyond the inevitable development of AI as a form of our collective destiny, as it stands at this very moment in history, its capability awaits human direction. The same technology that could reduce us to predictable consumers on autopilot could also reveal and uproot patterns in our creativity we've never seen. The same systems that may automate sentience may also augment our perception of reality beyond our current imagination. The outcome depends not on the mitigation of consequence, but on who sets the goals, who writes the rewards, who defines value, and what values become principles through philosophy and a Post-Semantic view on capitalism.

Some will say: "America never made a Virgil." We answer: we made Coltrane, and then we underfunded the university where he taught us how to breathe and think beyond the notes on the paper, beyond a system which marginalized his nation.

The American canon exists, and we refuse to read it and understand its almost biblical influence. A critical piece of the American canon is written in rhythm and changes. It's performed in clubs and concerts. It values spontaneous, live, public composition over recitation, creation over interpretation, the new over the known. Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" is a "Divine Comedy"—a spiritual journey through musical rather than verbal language, and a testament to infinite, generative, formulaic composition - that of the human. Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Recognition of the greater good.

Some will say: "Excellence is elitist." We answer: Mediocrity is elitist.

When we lower standards, we don't liberate; we condescend and defend. When we say everyone is already excellent, we rob people of the journey toward mastery. We rob legacies of the men and women who died for their telos and philosophy. Democracy means everyone gets a chance to become excellent, not that we pretend everyone already is. The Department provides that chance through education, discourse, technology, and markets.

We're here to correct asymmetry in our humanities. To raise humanity’s top producer of prestige with curation. To show what's possible when we understand that art is technology. To raise standards and prove that excellence has value the market can measure. To raise stakes with research and education, demonstrating that music is not just entertainment but supreme intelligence. To raise the next generation with an ethic which supplants in its ethos that freedom and liberty require discipline, that creation requires courage, and that excellence is a choice.

Not a leap of faith, not a theory, but an infinity pool of possibility.

IX. What We Build

Concretely, a fellowship that cuts across silos of academia and industry. Drummers and neuroscientists working on the same problems. What happens in the brain when a drummer settles into the pocket? How does rhythm create a collective consciousness? Saxophonists and systems engineers designing exercises that expand rather than replace human capability. Critics and cryptographers building reputation systems that can't be gamed and equalize the grip that social media has on artists and the art industry. Each Fellow commits to one year of active collaboration, public performance of research, and teaching what they learn.

The Fellowship is not honorary; it's operational. The drummer teaching the data scientist about subdividing time. The philosopher teaching the trumpet player about aesthetics and semiotics. The venture capitalist teaching the vocalist about equity structures and public speaking. The saxophone player teaching the philosopher about the correlation between the circle of fifths and levels of consciousness. The pianist and marketer identifying the similarities between a major scale and a buyer’s journey. The neuroscientist observing polyvagal theory in action during a compelling trumpet solo or practice session.

The Department of Jazz builds bodies of work and research which puts the humanities back in balance through capitalism.

X. The Research Agenda

The Department is a research institution, investigating questions that academia won't fund and industry won't ask:

What is the neural basis of swing? Neuroscientists have studied rhythm, but not groove. We put musicians in fMRI machines while they play, measuring not just when they play but how they feel. What patterns distinguish groove from syncopational accuracy? How does swing propagate from player to audience? Can and should we teach machines to swing, or is this fundamentally human?

How does improvisation encode information? A jazz solo is not random; it's structured spontaneity. What are the information-theoretic properties of great improvisation? How much entropy is optimal? How do masters balance surprise and coherence? Can and should we quantify taste?

What are the economics of excellence? Why do some scenes produce genius while others produce mediocrity? What funding structures support versus suppress innovation? How does patronage shape aesthetics? What market mechanisms could align incentives toward mastery rather than mediocrity? How does Jazz’s prestige affect society?

How can AI augment without replacing human creativity? Not theoretical speculation but empirical experiment. Building tools that expand practice. Philosophies that strengthen creative approaches. Systems that support without supplanting. The goal is not to automate creativity but to amplify it.

What does collective intelligence look like in practice? A jazz ensemble is a distributed cognitive system, processing information in parallel, making decisions without hierarchy. These are the same problems that plague distributed computing, organizational design, and social coordination. Jazz provides a working model we barely understand.

“Great collaboration feels like playing Jazz.” - Ray Dalio, Founder Bridgewater Associates

Bodies of work which merge the arts and sciences are an optimization towards the development and progress of excellence. In this way can we align by giving power to the arts and sciences in a time necessary for humanity.

XI. The Cultural Framework

Jazz Ascensionism provides something the current moment desperately lacks, which is a cultural framework for AI regulation and policy that isn't based on fear or greed, checked by the epistemologies and philosophies of human innovation.

When Congress asks how to regulate AI, we answer: by prioritizing human excellence through researching live performance.

When companies ask how to implement AI, we answer: augment and educate on the stakes, paint clearer pictures the road to mastery.

When educators ask how to teach in an age of AI, we answer: emphasize what can't be computed - presence, risk, collective creation - to encourage the discovery of the unknown and unpublished.

Because Jazz music has been commoditized, its value, prestige, and philosophies have been relegated to Capitalist Realism. Its life force is flattened to entertainment, publishing, and product. Jazz is inherently extremely capitalist. Inversely, Jazz Ascensionism believes that the intellectualization of Jazz will lead to exponential levels of capitalization. Not its commodification, but its Ascension through the recognition of its true value as America's contribution to world culture. Not as a semantic piece on Nationalism and the arts, but as a model for excellence, as a technology of freedom and the unrelenting exploration of the unknown in the face of constraint and rapid growth.

This is an event of monumental proportions which will change pockets of society through a positive perception of what Jazz is: not museum music but a living, vital philosophy to the fabric of mankind. Not entertainment but a body of intelligence which doesn’t exist in the past and paints the picture of a new future.

This is America claiming their Virgils, Shakespeares and Pascuales, for those who are aware around the world to see. This is identifying a thread of greatness carried from Aristotle, to Ben Franklin, to Elon Musk. But not through nationalism, a pejorative positioning of Jazz elitism, or the pessimists who argue that Jazz is a thing of the past. This is a discovery of the power of humanities, through the spontaneous, Post-Semantic philosophy of Jazz Ascensionism.

XII. The Choice Before Us

We must destroy the notion of artists against technology; it is art which balances the scales of sciences and technology against drift. It is art which is a form of technology in the lexicon of humanities. The arts have preserved a lineage and timeline where we can accelerate towards a previously unstudied realm of humanities where vital epistemologies behind thought, philosophy, and markets await a Post-Semantic society.

America has always been most itself at the edge of a new instrument. The printing press created the Republic - Benjamin Franklin's newspapers, Paine's pamphlets, Jefferson's declarations. The assembly line created consumer democracy - Ford's factories, Roosevelt's reforms, Keynesian circulation. Just like the microphone created mass culture with Sinatra's intimacy, Martin Luther King's dream, podcasts and protests, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington spread the sound of innovation, power, and influence, entirely democratic, capitalist, and countercultural, around the world during a time of adversity, uncertainty, and constraint.

Now the instrument is the model - the large language model, the generative model, the world model, the business model, the accumulation of capital. We can let the consequences of our society’s evolution scare us into paralysis while each day inevitably becomes more optimized, more algorithmic, and less surprising. Or we can compose new ideas, using these tools as instruments, not overlords. The Hyperstition of human ends, not technological ends.

The Department of Jazz exists to keep the memory of the high alive, to make artistic excellence perceivable and relatable, incentivizing funding and research to prove that a free civilization holds the foundations of how to listen to itself in public, in real-time, with consequence, with stature, through Jazz. We believe that the consequences to be revealed through Jazz Ascensionism are ultimately for the greater good of humanity itself.

We stand at the threshold of both an inevitable renaissance and a new dark age happening at once. The juxtaposition between classes will be further embellished, and new classes will be determined not by our access or use of technology, but by our choices about how to perceive technology as an integral, domineering ingredient in a live case study of our global humanities department - society and culture. Not by our capabilities but by our commitments to understanding innovation by humans. Not by our semantics but by our aesthetics.

The musicians are already playing. The audiences are already gathering. The technology is already here. What's missing is the entity which brings them together, sets the standards, pays the bills, aestheticizes the performances, teaches the community, and passes the torch indiscriminately as their “Why”.

John Coltrane’s Ascension is a template: an archive of a live, spontaneous, collective radical assertion of individuals inside a shared frame - each voice pursuing and realizing its highest values within the limits of the instrument. Freedom, discipline, ensemble.

The Department of Jazz builds rooms where performance is the end and the future is the means - arranging markets, tools, and research on liberty in sound and culture. We believe this is America’s national treasure.

We anchor today’s renaissance to an enduring standard of excellence, giving society clarity where yesterday’s markets devalued one of humanity's most productive and vital uses of technology - Jazz.